Law and Dominion

Biblical Law and Our Faith - RR264B4

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Track: 10

Dictation Name: RR264C5

Location/Venue: ________

Year: _______

[Rushdoony] --I want to thank Douglas for reminding of that excellent statement by Harry Miller the Harvard historian about the fact that the Puritans are the most tough minded people the world has ever known. I know that’s true because I married a wonderful Puritan. [audience laughs] One of my favorite stories about Puritans which I’ve told over and over again and which I relish greatly concerns a Puritan prayer meeting. The Puritans were the kind of people who when they prayed for rain brought their umbrellas. They didn’t have umbrellas in those days but they prepared for a hasty run home after their prayer meeting. Well, they had a drought once in New England and so they came together early one week to pray. And it rained! Very quickly, very heavily, and then more heavily, and more heavily, and more heavily! [audience chuckles]

So when they managed to get back to church the following Sunday, through a great deal of mud and flood, the pastor prayed a little peevishly. “Lord, when we prayed for rain we dids’t think that thou dids’t understand that what we wanted was a gentle sizzle sauzzle. But what you sent is a gully washer!!” [audience roars with laughter]

Our subject in this session is Our Business World. An important aspect of our faith is the biblical emphasis on work. Work as a vocation, as a calling under God. God declares in his word that he created man in his own image and set him upon the earth to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. God’s curse is not on work but on man and his sin; every aspect of man’s life feels the curse. But as we grow in the Lord from the time of our regeneration the work grows in its grace and the curse recedes from every aspect of our life, so that we know as Paul said that our labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Work, very early in the Christian centuries gained an importance in the life of man. The monastic orders very early stressed the necessity of work. Calvinistic of course and Calvinistic lands emphasize the doctrine of vocation and calling. The result was what is known to sociologists as the Puritan work ethic. The most productive single factor in the history of the world. The Puritan work ethic has had a worldwide propagation so that today the Puritan work ethic is stressed. Usually in many non Christian countries to a minor degree, but nonetheless held forth as an ideal and a standard. There are several reasons for this but I shall only cite three.

First. Whatever else judgement you may be inclined to pass on it, British Imperialism covered the face of the earth. And basic to British Imperialism were Scottish soldiers and Scottish commercial agents. Their activities were enormously effective in propagating a way of life and a work ethic so that Puritanism was, in effect, communicated to countless numbers of people all over the world. Because at the same time as these Scottish agents were placed in many parts of the world there were missionaries working there. And the culmination of the impotence of two made the Puritan work ethic a world wide factor.

Then second there was the influence upon Protestant culture especially in Reformed Countries upon foreign students. Now, it can be argued -and with cause- that the influx of foreign students into the Western world was in some ways disastrous. The foreign students gained a standard of living which in many cases they were unwilling to surrender when they returned home. And so, because they were unwilling to move back into the comparatively primitive circumstances of their own communities, they set themselves apart and became in many cases a firmant for revolution. Especially as the Western world began to communicated humanistic education to these peoples.

However, there were also many students who came to this country and experienced what can only be called cultural shock. What they found was that people of wealth worked; and foreign students coming from most non Christian cultures represented something of wealth in their homeland, which mean that they never engaged in manual labor of any kind! They did not upon bathing even do so much as pick up their discarded clothing or the towel they used. That was menial labor for someone else to do.

And as they stayed in dormitories they found that these other students who by comparison were much better off then they were thought nothing of doing these things. This in itself was a tremendous teaching factor, apart from anything else that they learned. And so many of these students, seeing the work oriented nature of Americans, for example, all economic strata returned home with a different concept of life. They carried back with them, to some degree, the Puritan work ethic.

Then since World War II we have had another factor. American industry has been very powerful all over the world. Now consider what American industry has done in such a land as Saudi Arabia. In many countries the local law specifies that the foreign corporations must train and use local workers. This means that, for example, Saudi Arabians work side by side in the oil fields with an American who has gone over there from Texas or California. The net result is that there is a great deal of communication between these two men and the total impact is that in one country after another, despite the iron facade as of Islam, underneath the surface there is a tremendous ferment at work; these Americanized workers are beginning to call for and demand a different kind of national life.

Thus the Puritan work ethic has spread to some degree into every corner of the world. At the same time, unfortunately, it has been receding in Britain and in the United States it’s homeland. The work ethic has given way to the political ethic. Not work as a means toward accomplishing anything or in any other way, but politics as the means to social progress. Since politics is non productive and tends as politics increases its power to decapitalize the country, the political ethic is the most destructive single force in our world today. It is very prevalent, it calls for advance through power not through work. And the United States for example between 1965 and 1975 the time actually spent on a job while on the job declined by ten percent.

Productivity is ceased and some experts in the field say it is actually declining. Most workers in the United States still subscribe to some degree to the work ethic, but they lack confidence in management, they feel that there is a gap between those and the top and between them and as a result they feel no interest in their work. Certainly that gap is a reality, I recognized the presence of it when I was caught in the Braniff collapse. Those workers had been asked to forego their paycheck at the end of last month, and they were ready to do it to help the company, but when the company folded it did nothing to help any one of the pilots, personnel, stewardesses, or others to get home from wherever they were stranded; and without a paycheck you had better believe they had problems.

This is the kind of thing that creates a gap and decreases productivity. An American industry has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear very often because of it’s failure in such matters. Otto Scott, one of our Chalcedon scholars, is at present working on an article for our journal of Christian Reconstruction both for the forthcoming issue and the one to secede it. Let me add that the next two issues will be among the most important things to appear this year in this country. The first issue, after this one on atonement that has just come out, will be one dealing with what is being done in the area of Christian reconstruction practically today across the country. But is being done in the black community and the white community anywhere, the types of activities that are prevailing.

The second issue, towards the end of the year, will deal with what is being done specifically for reconstruction in the business world. And we will have men dealing with that, we do have men who are interested in it; as a matter of fact we had two weeks ago today three men, important in the gold mining industry, call at Vallecito to spend some time discussing precisely this issue because they are concerned with Christianizing their operation. The second issue will deal with these problems, and Otto Scott will have a key article in both issues. In the latter issue he will touch on some things that deal with management, and I want to pass on very briefly one or two facets of his analyses.

Otto Scott, by the way, is not only an historian but has had extensive experience in industry as an executive. Including the oil world, where he is one of the best known figures. The point that Otto Scott makes is that we have separated management and worker to the destruction of efficiency and productivity. Why? Management today comes out of places like Harvard Business Administration school, it has no knowledge of the practical workings of the industry. Very often management has only the foggiest notion of what the product is! And instead of a management that comes up from the ranks and knows the industry backwards and forwards it is management that is trained in managing without knowing what they’re managing. And the results are proving disastrous.

Moreover, as Otto Scott has pointed out, modern industry today is increasingly like a government bureaucracy in that the only one who is concerned with showing a profit is the chairman of the board. Everyone else is working at the job as a man in a government bureaucracy with one purpose in life: increasing his own status and power. The result is that management and labor today don’t know how to talk to each other. The results are disastrous.

The other factor...it is the failure of the churches to develop theology of work. Pietism arising in the seventeenth century increasingly isolated man from the realities of an everyday world and summed up the essence of the Christian life as devotional exercises. Pray retreats and it turned the whole of the Christian lie from one of dominion and conquest to one of retreat. As a result when the industrial revolution began Christian theology turned against it. One of the first areas of protest was against the continuous operations of things such as railroads, and then later, dynamoes. They failed to apply works of necessity which they could see -where a farmer had to milk cows- to the area of operations such as of dynamos and power plants.

And the result was that whereas up to that point the Puritan influence in commerce and industry was very great, those people were driven out because the church failed to develop a theology for an industrial area. A theology of work and vocation. And now we are seeing in some circles the necessity of such an approach, but sometimes the efforts are failures because they are pietistic in approach rather than biblical and theological.

To cite an example of such failure: One man who had a factory which was really a sweatshop insisted that all the workers attend at a given time, apart from their work hours, a showing of Christian films designed to convert them. Since he was enormously detested by all the workers because of his sweatshop conditions, his unfair labor practices, and his general arrogance you can imagine how effective those films were. He attempted to hold prayer meetings in the plant and nobody wanted to pray with him, including the Christians.

But to give you a contrary example: In Wichita, Kansas there is the LoveBox factory. It’s a privilege and pleasure to go through that plant. The men who work there know that management is concerned for them with a Christian concern; they take pride in the work to are doing and because they are well paid they are highly productive, they produce the best paper made boxes in the United States and they know it.

In that plant there is an industrial chaplain. He was the pastor of a congregation of three thousand in Wichita and he left that to become a chaplain in a factory. He is one of a growing number of industrial chaplains who works with the workers in terms of family problems, personality problems, marital problems, economic hardships, and so on. But the work of Bob Love of the LoveBox factory and Don Scott the chaplain does not end there; Bob Love has set up there in Wichita the finest Christian school in the country perhaps, certainly it puts any other campus, including the luxury private schools for the wealthy, to shame. In fact, Bob Love is greatly resented by the very wealthy of the area because they feel that school should be the private reserve of the wealthy. After all, it has everything including an Olympic size swimming pool for the children. But that Christian school is open to the children of the employees. It is doing a remarkable work, it’s graduates are going on to the universities and showing a caliber that that part of the country has not seen out of any other school.

Now I could go on at great length to tell you what the LoveBox factory and Bob Love are doing, but want to be brief and we will have more about that operation in our journal at the end of this year. Suffice it to say that here is a pattern that establishes a unity between management and worker; so that as fellow Christians, as fellow believers, they work together and the non Christians in the factory have a respect for the faith because they know what it has done for them. And the status and dignity it has given to them as workers therein.

I mentioned earlier what it takes today to capitalize a job. At the beginning of the ‘70s a hundred thousand, now two hundred and fifty thousand. A job therefore represents a tremendous investment...what we often forget is that there is another investment in that job, the human capital of the worker! And it does not make sense to invest a great deal of money in a job and to disregard the human capital that is in the job because that human capital improperly treated can destroy your equipment, can use it poorly and inefficiently and destructively and this is happening in many places.

Thus we must recognize two things about every worker. First, he is created in the image of God. A religious fact. As such, he is our fellow creature, as such he is our potential brother in Christ, as such he has claims upon that God has established in his word! And to treat that tremendous human capital with anything but the utmost care and respect is a sin and a very prevalent sin in our time. Second, that human capital is important economically! A tremendous resource. In every case where a plant has attempted to do the most elementary thing to include labor and to sum awareness of the needs of the work and the directions it is to take, even if it is in the form of a suggestion box, finds that it pays off. It pays off economically and it pays off in human relations.

And yet, the sad fact is that although it is a proven fact that such suggestion boxes often produce suggestions that not only give a bonus to the worker but result in better products, shortcuts, savings to management,... there are yet so many places that disdain to adopt any such thing because all they are interested in is their own promotion in terms of their work, not the total society. The worker is the best capital of all, and because he is a person he must be treated as such. Man is created in the image of God.

But our modern world is very much under the influence of a book the enlightenment produced, which is regularly in print again. {?} Man, A Machine. It was seen as a great mark of progress and scientific to view man as a machine, and today even though we no longer hold scientifically to the extreme mechanism of (Le Maitre?) sociologically we are under the influence of such thinking in that our approach to people is mechanistic, mechanical, and impersonal. We have come to love a world of impersonality. The growth since of the twenties of the city came when the city was least important economically. In earlier generations the city was important as an economic center because it was located at a water way, hence an ease in moving it’s goods, or on a key point in a railway line, hence again the ease of transportation; and at a point where supplies would most readily available, thus where there was a concentration of cities.

But with the development of the automobile, with the development of aeronautics, there is no longer a need for economic concentration and many disadvantages to it.

And yet our greatest concentration has come when there has been the least economic necessity for it! Why? Because in the that same time span, what we have seen is the growth of humanism and the deChristianization of American man. As a result with that growth of humanism and the scientific world and life perspective modern man has come to love impersonalism. He prefers not to get involved too much in the life of his neighbors and the less he knows about his neighbors the freer he feels. He feels no responsibility for other people, and we have had a few tragic incidents in recent years when people as the New York have brutally assaulted and even murdered, and no one has gone to their aid.

The mechanistic point of view because it is impersonal means non involvement, because to become involved is to return to a world and life view which is essentially Christian, which emphasizes an intrapersonal responsibility. The world of business has come to represent this kind of impersonalism, and the results have been disastrous in that it has alienated management and labor one form the other. We have seen this very disastrously in recent years.

You’ve read in the papers how one newspaper after another has folded in recent years, and on business after another, because management went to labor at a critical point and said, if you make your demands we going to shut down. We’re against a wall, financially. And labor persisted in it’s demands, and the operation ended, and the reaction of labor was shock. “We didn’t believe them. We never had any reason to believe them.” And that’s the truth. The gap between management and labor has been so great that neither has ever really believed in the other, and as they face economic crisis all too often the whole operation has gone down the tubes for lack of understanding, for lack of communication, a lack of an elementary belief in what the other is saying.

As a result because of this mechanistic, this impersonal, view of man; and man’s view as a result of modern education of himself, life has been stripped by this mechanistic, materialistic, naturalistic perspective of meaning and a purpose. That meaning and purpose which only God can give. The consequence has been the development of what the French call ennui. We tend to equate ennui in English with boredom, but Margaret Mitchner in her study has said and I quote: “Annui is a sick emptiness that drives people to drink or drugs or travel or fornication is a desperate and unsuccessful search for distraction.” Unquote. We have a world today that is suffering from annui.

The era before the French revolution was marked, as Margaret Mitchner points out, with annui. She cites Julie Day Lespinasse, whose dates were 1732 - 1736, who wrote to Condor saying, and I quote: “I feel that books neither instruct nor amuse me. And as for what I can write, I am quite sure that nothing is worth saying. What is the good of writing letters even to one’s friends?” Unquote. Nothing is worth saying because for her nothing was worthwhile, including life. She observed of a friend, a prominent person of the day, her head is empty and her soul is a real desert. And we must say of modern man that his soul is a real desert; and all too often the souls of men in management and workers is a desert.

The Christian must recognize this. He is dealing with men whose lives are like a wasteland. I’m reminded of what the Psalmist said when he spoke in Psalm 84:6 of a person who, passing through a place that was desolate like the valley of Baca, changed it. And he said of such who passing through the valley Baca make it a well, the rain also filleth the pools. People who in terms of their lives transform situations.

Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 says that our relationship to the world outside in our business relations with the unbelievers is to be one of Godly living of honesty of good workmanship --- and this he says is to be the witness of brotherly love. In the world of business today we face a twin evil. First, management is unwilling to fire incompetent workers, and the results are bad for workers and management as well as for investors. And this represents a moral incompetence. And related to this, second, is an unwillingness to get involved in the lives of others because involvement means problems. And the result is neither helpfulness nor judgement in management and in labor relations. In a sound relationship, any sound relationship, between person --- between capital and labor --- there has to be communication both ways.

And this today is lacking. We have reduced management is our schools, like Harvard, to an academic discipline! A matter of knowing how to file things and arrange things, not to deal with managements basic concerns: labor and the product. And the results are deadly. Have we had examples of Christian management? I indicated the LoveBox factory and that in our journal we will deal with a number of solutions, efforts, and experiments in this direction.

I’d like to cite one which will probably not be in the journal. The old believers is (Souris?), Russia. They were an illegal group, they were very often persecuted by the Russian Orthodox church. But the old believers became the industrial entrepreneurs of Russia, beginning in the 1700’s for more than a century they were the major single commercial industrial factor is (Souris?), Russia! What did they do? An industrial enterprise by an old believer was conducted in terms of what he felt was biblical practice. When he started a plant or a business developed beyond himself he invited the elders of the church to come and sit down and to form with him a governing council to see what could be done that was best for the Christian welfare of all concerned -- of management and of labor.

They took this very seriously. What did they do? They provided. Wherever there was no housing: free housing for the workers. They provided schooling, they set up institutions whereby widows and orphans and the elderly were cared for. They went out and found girls who were pregnant and in a sorry state because they were abandoned, and had homes for them and converted them. When they saw any man who was industrious, whether he was a peasant farmer or a worker, they said we will lend you more without interest on a short term basis if you’re ready to work. We’re interested in converting you, but first we’re going to help you. And they did.

And countless numbers of people were rescued from serfdom and made into very productive and sometimes very wealthy individuals. They had hospitals, they had institutions for the insane, and they made money! You had better believe they made money. Because every person who worked for the old believers in these institutions knew that they had it made, that they’d never find a situation where anyone would care as much for them, love them as much as these old believers, elders, and owners did. And they showed their gratitude by their productivity.

I do believe that if Sauer Nicholas I had not wiped out the old believers factories and enterprises with persecution, (Saurist?) Russia would never have had a revolution. As one contemporary economist --not a Christian-- said: “Every old believers center became a combination of chamber of congress, a convent, a seminary, a consistory, an exchange, a religious center, a business center and a welfare center.” They did it. They did it and they demonstrated that nothing worked better because they did it in terms of the word of God which they took serious, every word of it, and they knew this was God’s world and what God says in his word works best in his world.

In a sense we have seen something of a comparable nature is this country on the other side. We have seen the establishment of tremendous corporations which have involved themselves in social reform but from a humanistic perspective. Look at the major corporations: Ford, Rockefeller, Glenmede Trust, Lily, all of them. Some of them once founded by Christians but today their concern is to do what the old believes did but from a humanistic perspective, and the result is a growing disaster for them and for the country. It is we who have failed. It is the Christian sector which fails to fund Christian reconstruction.

But we are called to Christianize all of life. Granted, federal regulations makes some of the things that I have indicated difficult to do, but they were far more difficult for the old believers to do because their very existence was outside the law. But they did it. It is time for us to carry our faith into all the world, including the world of business. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly father, it has been good for us to be here. Thy word is truth and thou hast called us to go forth and make disciples of all nations, teaching them all things that thou hast commanded. Thou hast summoned us to exercise dominion, to exercise knowledge, righteousness and holiness. And to bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Christ our king. Make us bold in this purpose, prospering in thee to the end of the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. In Jesus name, amen.

And now, before we begin our question and answer period --and Clint Miller is coming to take charge of it-- I think we all owe a very very great debt of gratitude to Clint and Elizabeth Miller. [audience applauds enthusiastically] Elizabeth, why don’t you stand too please... Elizabeth Miller, in case you haven’t-- [Rushdoony is drowned out by continuing applause] They do all the work for this conference, and it is because of them that it is so well run, managed, planned, and executed and I’m very grateful to them for what they are doing.

[short pause] [audience member] Christians literally turned the world upside down for Christ, how is it do you think that they failed to influence Romans civil government? Or did they have an influence?

[Scott Douglas] Well they had a very great influence on Roman’s civil government, the fact of their lives, the fact that they would pick up the abandoned babies under the bridges of Rome and take them home and raise them as Christians, the fact that they would take in elderly Romans who were dying and let them die in their homes, their love for one another, their love for the lost began to attract large numbers into the churches. And not just the lower classes, some even in Caesar's household. The government of course tried to persecute them to stop them and it didn’t work so eventually Constantine in the early 4’th century declared-- well first of all he gave Christianity toleration, then he declared that Christianity was the religion of the empire. So yes, it had a strong effect, and the very fact that in one sense it took the official structures of the empire shows how much the military men and the leaders of the nation at that time respected it.

Now perhaps what you’re asking is this: If the Roman state was supposedly turned Christi, then why did it fall. Well, I indicated in the papers that there was a great deal of ingrained humanism in the structures of the Roman state that were not changed by the men that took over, and some of the emperors succeeding Constantine were what is known as- the technical word is- Arianism. Now that was a very serious heresy which denied that Jesus Christ was the second person of the trinity, which denied him being God. It essentially made him a creature. And the Arians, who were not under the Lordship of Christ because they didn’t think he was Lord, they wanted the state to be Lord. And they fell into the same practical sin that the pre Christian empires had been in, that the state is God instead of God, so the Arians wanted to use Christianity -their own kind of watered down Christianity- to hold the state together. And the judgement of God came down on that, he removed the Roman state so that Christianity could develop. That would be my answer.

[audience member] Francis Schaeffer in his latest book, Christian Manifesto (quietly?) a statement is made, a call to...what is essentially a call to rebellion against civil authority if indeed that becomes necessary in this country or in any place in the world. Could you perhaps elaborate on your perception of this statement?

[Rushdoony] I don’t recall a specific statement although I did read the book and found it very worthwhile, but I believe what he has in mind -if my recollection serves me correctly- and what John Whitehead has in mind in his book the second American revolution or the legal revolution -I forget the exact title- is that our rebellion is to take a legal form insofar as possible. That we are to use every instrument of the law against these people. I think we haven’t begun to utilize these resources! We have not gotten into the political arena. We barely did to a degree in eighty. But one of the tragic facts I find across country is that when Christian candidate runs, a good man, for -say- congress, people are ready to pat him on the back and say “Wonderful, brother. I’ll pray for you!” and they will not contribute a dime to his campaign! It takes money to run a campaign!

One very fine man, a friend on our mailing list who ran for congress and had a very good chance, came close! He had all kind of pats on the back, and then he had to foot the bill for $150,000.00 in campaign expenses which virtually wiped him out! Now that story is a commonplace one! Well, we are working to remedy that. We as Christians must recognize that we have to contribute to Christian reconstruction in the church, in Christian schools, in organizations like Chalcedon, politicians who are running for office, and so on. If we don’t, we don’t have any right to complain.

Now we haven’t tried that yet! I think we could take over the country very easily if we Christians put our dollars where our mouths are...but we don’t. And I think we should, very quickly.

[audience member speaks unintelligibly]

[Rushdoony] I think there was one back here... Yes. Steve?

[Steve] Yes, I wanted to ask when you were talking about political rebellion, was there a sense of conferring to someone who was in a position of authority, of someone who had authority, ah, this person being a ruler could rather than an anarchistic kind of rebellion it makes it actually ruler versus ruler making the break for -let’s say- telling the King that what he has done is unlawful.

[Rushdoony] That was what Calvin recommended in the Institutes and elsewhere; we haven’t begun to utilize the processes of resistance, of change. So I think it’s wrong to think about anything on the end of the road. I don’t think it’s necessary, and it doesn’t work in this day and age by and large, especially in a large industrial country. We haven’t tried to change this country yet. Let’s try it. I think we can do it.

Yes, Bill?

[Bill] I’m wondering, Doctor, if a number of people are not troubled with the proposition that we must be obedient unto the authorities. And that has been interpreted in the churches as to mean you need to accept the present situation with no hope for change. Don’t we need to address some effort and thought and pray to that particular point?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And that’s why I dealt with Wycliffe’s idea of the writ of Cessavit. In effect this is what we have to apply to the political process today, and use the legal means to issue a writ of Cessavit against bad politicians and bureaucrats. Well. I think our time is up, isn’t it, Glenn?

[Glenn] Yeah, I think we better adjourn officially, at least because I’m sure there are some people that have to leave. Those that want to stay for a while I--

[Rushdoony] No, we’d better clear the room.

[Glenn] Alright.

[audience applauds] [audio ends]